A short gaze at the forums again today and it looks like internal warfare between fans of individual games continues if not intensified.

This is why I find it difficult to have faith in mass-community-oriented development especially for games like Unreal Tournament with far too many specific variables.

When ever someone mentions the word 'dumbing down' on a series of core+ games with far too many variables to pin down, gold turns back into turd.

I'm pretty sure despite that though, Epic will be able to make the game. As for an overly bitter community unwilling to support it... we'll end up with another UT3-like scenario where a large ascertainable percentage of criticism was philosophical pandering unreachable to the technical and realistic aspects dev teams are trying to achieve.

Any excitement I had about this is being killed by the community bickering and the idea of paying for modding/mapping tools and user-made content. The idea of supporting developers is great, but the community is just going to be divided between servers that have all the DLC and the ones that don't.

Well... the truth to my lack of opinion to actually charge forth with would come down to one thing:

I have completely no idea what I want in a new Unreal Tournament. That's probably 95% of the whole chemistry I've mixed myself into right now. But the thing is, we DO want Unreal Tournament. Whether it be a new one or not is moot?

I'm not sure if, perhaps, a large number of individuals in the forums don't have a clue about exactly what they want either. Another gaze into the forums and people actually want an Unreal Tournament '99-2 or an Unreal Tournament 2004-2. I think I can rightly assume if Epic wanted to have an Unreal Tournament revival that appeases fans but NOT turn much of a profit... suddenly place more news and emphasis on community mods and content and maybe even do some uplifting. It'll be the nicest thing they can do to UT in general.

But Epic wants to turn a profit, so they have the monetized mods idea which, I must say, isn't bad at all. Everyone gets to put their idea in and eventually use a super cutting-edge toolset like UE4 and turn a profit through ye ol' mod culture practices. It's the best of both worlds. And the base game is frickin' FREEEEEE.

But that latter bit is also a problem: maybe it's not actually the direction we want for UT to go but it isn't worthy of hate either so it's never in-mind. It feels somewhat useless because, really, we could just go install old mods with some amount of juice still being churned every now and then from our own aging community - which might as well be more worth while than a 'premium' 14.99 USD mod maybe that has AAA graphics most of us here can easily find in other games. And that, while UT has always had a face-mashing moody atmosphere that only good (or maybe just decent?) art direction could produce, we were only minimally interested in fancy shiny technical graphics.

It's clear when our focus here on USP in the maps schema, for example, is about things like architectural flow, atmosphere, conceptual grandness, layout, gameplay pace, gameplay balance... there's no spot in the schema for how some map manages to use DX10/11 effects and has things like Rembrandt rays or bloom. In fact, I can probably state for everyone here that we all don't actually like post-processing or new graphics techniques that much - because we all think a solid artistic sense is all that's necessary to push through and I totally DIG that idea. Nobody has ever downrated a map here for not having DX10/11 crap.

To top it all off... I showed SP-AHRG to a friend of mine and he thought, if it wasn't for the low poly 90's models, he'd think it was a PS2/3 game. That comment came from a guy who does Call of Duty and Battlefield, game series that are actually known for trying to push technical graphics but, so to speak, having no imagination in terms of concept art. (although the futuristic CoD games are somehow becoming more liberated in the use of fantastical ideas)

I want to get excited about this "remake", but the truth is that I really can't be bothered with any new games anymore. The reason I like UT99 is all the mods - especially Oldskool. Without them, vanilla UT is pretty boring. I didn't get in to the multiplayer scene for very long. I do enjoy matches against bots with lots of mods enabled, but not with the official maps and boring vanilla settings.

I only really play the old games now. The new games are too difficult to create anything for, and I've noticed there isn't much to do in them besides play the official content. On top of that, I can't be bothered trying to compile a "perfect" install like I've already done with UT99 (among other old games). The old games are so incredibly flexible with custom content that they never get boring. The new games may look great, but have a very low replay value without all the custom content. I just don't have the time anymore to learn the new games, either.

I didn't find any topic for the case, so I made one.The topic stands for your ideas mostly. Feel free to share something you have in mind about the upcoming title, or just lurk around.Please fulfill the local etiquette, so avoid unnecessary, or rude criticizing and stuff like that....

WallFun ~makemeunreal

My goal was to create something easy, but really enjoyable, which is easy to load or make.So, I decided next to a mutator. A mutator is an easy way to modify pickups as far as I know.The mutator itself modify our health at spawn to 2 HP, and gives us a modified Sniper Rifle which'sscope can see through walls, and the rifle itself is powerful enough to shoot through walls.The rifle can hold 3 rounds at once.(This feature stands for balancing like, "Hey I am outta, gotta go hunt some rounds around.")This rifle has a damage of 1 HP/shot.Items.The mutator removes every armor, power-up pickup, and use only 50% of the remaining health and ammo actors. (Randomly spawns stuff on them)Ammo and Health stuff are heavily modified too.Both gives you 1 point to your rounds/ health, and has a respawn time of 30 secs.

Then, people can use the mut. in CTF, DM or whatever gametype.I CAN'T do the scripting stuff, so it's just an idea. (Would be cool to see when UT4 comes out though )

"They let us go about our business here, but it is a farce. I know that they are watching us, controlling us. I believe that this once safe haven is as deadly as the surface planet below."